"The court was celebrating the marriage of Madame Marguerite de Valois, daughter of Henri II. and sister of King Charles IX., with Henri de Bourbon, King of Navarre; and that same morning the Cardinal de Bourbon had united the young couple with the usual ceremonial observed at the marriages of the royal daughters of France, on a stage erected at the entrance to Nôtre Dame. This marriage had astonished everybody, and occasioned much surmise to certain persons who saw clearer than others. They could not comprehend the union of two parties who hated each other so thoroughly as did, at this moment, the Protestant party and the Catholic party; and they wondered how the young Prince de Condé could forgive the Duke d'Anjou, the king's father, for the death of his father, assassinated by Montesquieu at Jarnac. They asked how the young Duke de Guise could pardon Admiral de Coligny for the death of his father, assassinated at Orleans by Poltrot de Mère." [Illustration: _La Cité_] * * * * * The Tour de Nesle is one of those bygones of the history of Paris, which as a name is familiar to many, but which, after all, is a very vague memory. It perpetuates an event of bloodshed which is familiar enough, but there are no tangible remains to mark the former site of the tower, and only the name remains--now given to a short and unimportant _rue_. The use of the title "La Tour de Nesle," by Dumas, for a sort of second-hand article,--as he himself has said,--added little to his reputation as an author, or, rather, as a dramatist. In reality, he did no more than rebuild a romantic drama, such as he alone knows how to build, out of the framework which had been unsuccessfully put together by another--Gaillardet. However, it gives one other historical title to add to the already long list of his productions. * * * * * The history of the Conciergerie is most lurid, and, withal, most emphatic, with regard to the political history of France. For the most part, it is more associated with political prisoners than with mere sordid crime, as, indeed, to a great extent were many of the prisons of France. The summer tourist connects it with Marie Antoinette; visits the "Cachot de Marie Antoinette;" the great hall where the Girondists awaited their fate; and passes on to the Palais des Beaux Arts, with never a thought as to the great political part that the old prison played in the monarchial history of France. To know it more fully, one should read Nogaret's "Histoire des Prisons de Paris." There will be found anecdotes and memoirs, "_rares et precieux_" and above all truthful. It has been eulogized, or, rather, anathematized in verse by Voltaire,-- "Exterminez, grandes Dieux, de la terre ou nous sommes Quiconque avec plaisir repand le sang des hommes,"-- and historians and romancists have made profuse use of the recollections which hang about its grim walls.